Travel Journals: Student-Created Textbooks (Transcript)

Emily Pittman: Travel journals are the textbooks that our kids create themselves. They’re a great way for students to really take ownership of their learning.

Denver Huffstutler: We call them travel journals because it becomes a journey of all their engaging activities.

Emily Pittman: So this is a blank-slate travel journal from the module that we’re currently doing, “Follow Me Through Tennessee”.

Lydia: When they start out they’re all just a blank book. We get to create a page about our learning about that subject, and it’s fun because you get to tie it in. You get to keep them at the end of the session.

Emily Pittman: So the table of contents the kids put in at the beginning so that we can hand them the materials and say, “Okay, open up to page nine. We’re gonna be working on our history of West Tennessee page,” and it gives kids the main idea of what that page will be about.

Here we have our essential questions.

Those questions are really the basis of every single one of our lessons that we teach. One of our leaves says, “How does change occur over time? How does where you live affect how you live?”

Denver Huffstutler: If you look at the travel journals, everything that’s in there, it’s “Here’s how I understand how to answer the essential question that I was looking to uncover.”

Emily Pittman: Well, “I wonder” questions are done at the very beginning of modules. We usually give them a little bit of background information with our hook lesson. So we posted these four topics on the board and prompted them, “We want you to think of an ‘I wonder’.” Little Lucy, here, wondered how Tennessee became a state. It’s an easy assessment to know what we need to cover a lot or what we don’t need to cover so much.

Denver Huffstutler: –About twenty-five to twenty-eight lessons within a quarter that we put together. We not only want to include things that the student has learned, but we also want there to be reflective times and those are things that we can assess.

Jill Levine: These travel journals are rich with timelines, charts, diagrams, lots of writing, vocabulary, pictures.

Emily Pittman: We provide our lesson. We then– usually we have a prompt that they respond to after the lesson. They do their draft and put it into written form. We talk about ways that they can revise and correct their mistakes. So then their published pieces turn into their travel journals.

Teacher: Right now I’d like to see you guys flipping through making sure all pages are complete, making sure that you have titles and headings on every page. In the middle of the table you’ll find your rubric.

Denver Huffstutler: A rubric is a simple way for students to judge their own understanding of content or completion of an assignment.

Emily Pittman: The rubric, it’s a reflection of the table of contents.

Grady: You can grade yourself in what do you think it is and the teacher grades what you got. If you got, like, a check-minus right here, you know now what you can work on.

Denver Huffstutler: As students go into older grades, the rubric tends to be a little bit more specific of things that have to be there. So it’s a great tool for the student to redirect their own learning.

Emily Pittman: The covers are usually completed towards the end of quarter once they have a full understanding and we do some kind of main idea of that module on the front cover.

Finn: A travel journal is very fun to do, because you really get to show what you have learned.

Hayden: I get to show all my work that I’ve done working really hard in school to my parents and to my teacher.

Jill Levine: What’s really special about travel journals is they really become prize possessions for our students. If they’re here for eight years and they’ve created four of these every year, they’ll have thirty-two, and so most of our students will have a shelf at home where all their travel journals are lined up and parents often say that that’s the bedtime reading. That’s what they most want to go back to, is they want to read those travel journals. When students are engaged, when they’re getting their hands dirty, when they’re creating, when they’re painting, when they’re thinking and problem solving, that’s when true learning takes place.

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Normal Park Museum Magnet School